In new business presentations and from our clients, we are often asked about the digital marketing silver bullet for generating awareness and increasing engagement. Unfortunately, there isn’t one or two tactics that magically do the trick. The beauty of the digital marketing world is that you can continuously experiment and measure different strategies to see which combination resonates the most with your audiences.
Our answer to the above question typically involves providing some tips designed to set your business up for success.
Get into your audiences’ heads with buyer persona research
Research and buyer personas help us determine what’s on our target audiences’ minds. Even if you don’t have the budget or time to do in-depth personas, shape what you do know about them by using current client information and secondary research. What’s bothering them? What problems are they trying to solve? What matters to them most when they reach out for help from a partner? Why should they listen to you? Today’s AI tools can help jumpstart some of your research.
Test, learn, and optimize your campaign marketing strategies
We continually recommend testing different elements of a digital marketing campaign to gain important insights that can shape the success of what you’re trying to achieve. Test creative, whether headlines and copy or imagery, to see what generates interest. Test calls to action – what may attract one person may not be of interest to another. Test timing as receptiveness to different messages can vary by whatever else the recipient is dealing with at the moment. Test placements, as one particular channel or LinkedIn group may be more favorably received by one segment of your audience than another.
Mind the engagement metrics and web analytics
Almost everything can be measured today. Whether you’re looking to increase time on your website, improve email conversions, or gain more followers, the information gleaned from your web analytics and metrics is invaluable to deciding how to proceed. If you don’t have an analytics team and aren’t sure where to begin, tap your email and CRM partners for guidance. Be sure to express your goals so they can craft a solution that helps track your progress best.
Stay on it: Engage, test, measure, repeat
We’ve seen firms start out strong with the best plan and intentions for engaging, testing, and measuring. A month or two goes by and they get discouraged by not seeing the results they expected and then drop it. Wrong plan. With all the channels and messages flying at us today, you can’t expect anyone to recall your message until they’ve seen it at least 6-7 times or more. Plus, you need time to assess the tests you ran and the metrics you generated to see if anything should be optimized for better results.
Deploy appropriate omnichannel marketing to be where your audiences are
The marketing channels available to use continue to evolve. Explore different outreach opportunities and do the testing noted above. Be mindful of where your audiences choose to spend their time. What worked for one audience last year may not generate the same results this year. Just when you think you have a good grasp on where your audience is going for information, another possibility pops up.
There are so many ways to engage with audiences today that it can seem hard to determine the right mix. Keeping these tips in mind should help you understand that consistent testing and optimizing are critical to helping you reach your goals. Reach out to our team if you’d like help with anything from determining KPIs to testing creative and channels to analyzing results and optimizing campaigns.
